


I want a girl with a mind like a diamond

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Helena warnings, Olivier warnings, Orphan Black more like Sarah is really hot: the television show
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 20:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Man," I said to myself while watching Orphan Black. "Everyone is really attracted to Sarah. <em>Everyone</em>."</p><p>"...I should write about this."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Alison

Sarah leaves Felix’s flat in a storm of righteous indignation, Felix on her heels. Alison watches the door slide shut behind them and lets her eyes flutter shut.

“Admit it,” says Cosima, grinning. “You were _totally_ checking out her ass.”

What Alison was actually doing was thinking _I would kill someone for pills_ , remembering the amount of hers that are dead already (the Europeans were enigmas, but _Beth_ ), and hastily amending that statement. At Cosima’s comment, though, she jolts guiltily anyway.

“ _No!_ ” she yelps, her painted mouth pursed in an immaculate symbol of outrage. Next to her, Cosima jolts in a mirror movement ( _ha_ , thinks Alison, and then _I shouldn’t have had so much to drink_ ) and then leans in closer.

“No, no, it’s totally cool,” the other woman says, her hands sketching out aborted shapes in the air as she talks. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. It’s like, we’re all genetic identicals, right? Everything about us should be, um, identical. So why is it so…” Her hand gestures morph into something a little bit _rounder_.

“She came to my house when I tied Donnie to a chair,” Alison blurts, in a desperate attempt to change the subject. It fails when she remembers Sarah’s confidence, the way she moved. Hm. Time for more wine. With the glass as a shield, she mutters, “She was very…” (hot) “…assured.”

“Yeah, I think she has a savior complex,” Cosima says, nodding. She seems surprisingly relaxed about the whole thing until Alison remembers her hobbies. Then everything makes sense. While she thinks this, Cosima launches into another round of excited jabbering, hands waving wildly like a few butterflies. Alison gets the words “nature versus nurture,” “genetic variation,” and “coding” before she catches herself thinking about Sarah. The way she’d stormed into her house, brash and curt but…strangely confident. In Donnie’s startled babbling, she’d caught something about “the rock of the house” and thought – had Sarah taken the time, in all of that chaos, to try and help her? Why?

She can’t – she can’t figure Sarah out at all, really. At first she thought the woman was a common thug, but she has a _daughter_. Out of all of the clones, they’re the only ones with children, and Alison can respect the work and love of it. You couldn’t, you _couldn’t_ have a child if there wasn’t something greater than brutality at your core.

And, okay, her ass is amazing. She doesn’t quite get how that works, but it is.

Her thoughts are broken with a sudden “Hey!” from Cosima. The woman waves her hand in front of Alison’s face once, twice, and it takes an innate familiarity with her own features to recognize the baffled hurt tucked behind the amusement. She blinks, tilts her head, focuses.

“Are you okay?” Cosima asks.

“Mm,” replies Alison intelligently. She takes advantage of the ensuing silence to enjoy another sip of wine.

“It’s okay to take the contract, you know,” says Cosima. Her voice is soft, not like Alison’s, or Sarah’s, or Beth’s. She wishes, suddenly, she’d paid attention to the speech Cosima just gave. What makes them so different? Sarah cares for her daughter more than anything and she still won’t take the bait. What lies within their genes that separates strong from weak, that separates Sarah’s hands on the gun from Alison’s?

“Is it?” she asks abruptly, desperately. She needs to know with a sudden sharpness whether or not it _is_ okay, whether she is making the Right Choice. It’s like holding a scale, and each end has a family on it. Her children, or her sisters? Why does she have to choose?

“Yeah,” Cosima murmurs. “Hey. You’re gonna be fine. It’s all going to…work out. I think.” She uncoils sinuously and goes to get more wine.

All Alison can think is _damn it, she was right about Sarah’s ass._ She can’t figure out why it makes her so sad. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I messed up some stuff chronologically here? Hopefully nothing's too bad. I totally picked random words for Cosima's rambling, so apologies if that doesn't make any sense, haha. I am not a geek monkey. Comments and concrit are always welcome!


	2. Paul

When Paul stands outside of the apartment he is a man of Neolution. He can practically feel the chains around his neck at this point, the whispered word “ _Afghanistan_ ” heavy as any metal. He is a soldier. He is a monitor.

When he steps inside he belongs entirely to Sarah.

Even when the apartment is empty he can see her everywhere (the way he could see Beth, sometimes, before the pills – dancing around the apartment, laughing, pulling him into the bedroom with sparkling eyes). There, on the couch: posed like a frightened animal as his hands shook on the gun. The kitchen, where he didn’t drug her – the kitchen, where her naked body writhed above him like poetry in motion. The apartment smells like her, now. It hums with her energy. It loves her.

Paul wonders if he loves her too.

She surged in like a hurricane, in quick movements – how fast, her gestures, ripping off his belt, ripping off his zipties. Pulling him out of Club Neolution like a child. He still remembers resting his head on her side and how, for that blind moment, he’d desperately needed comfort more than he ever had.

(She was so strong, under his weight. Strong like a pillar, strong like steel. Beth was—)

“You’ve trusted the wrong person,” Oliver said, his breath like rotten meat in Paul’s face (and he knows endless ways to break this piggish man, listed in antiseptic typeface against the back of his eyelids). But that’s when he realized that he _hasn’t_. If anything, it’s Sarah who’s trusted the wrong person. Sarah shouldn’t have put her faith in him.

But she did. _Fatal error_ , whispers Olivier’s ghost.

Sarah changed the game, the chessboard: on one side, Beth’s pieces in bone-white, surging endlessly towards the empty black spaces on the other side of the board. He played endless rounds of stalemate, checkmate, just trying to keep her from wiping her own pieces off the board. Sarah walked in, saw the board, and laughed. Flipped it sideways. Now all he’s left with are fragile pawns, where once he had a queen. Now it’s Sarah blocking him at every turn, lazy as a cat, flying out of the apartment, leaving him with Leekie in an empty lot. The game feels more like a game than ever, even as the stakes raise. Even as she is adorned with injuries like a mockery of royalty: a delicate purple ring of bruises on her throat, ruby-red gilding her face. She still stands proud, and tall. She is a queen, and he would fall on his sword a million million times to be her knight.

But. She doesn’t need him. She never needed him at all. She’s stronger and truer than him, and she’ll stand fine on her own.

He should probably be honored he even got to see her moving, in the flesh. He should probably feel lucky. Any of those Neolution pigs would salivate at the chance to see her, touch her (fuck her against the wall, feel her shuddering – no, to picture anyone else doing that makes him sick). _Anyone_ would want her. He should feel lucky. He should.

He doesn’t. He wants to wake up every morning with her in his arms. He wants to own every part of her, hold her in the cage of his arms so that she cannot fly from him. She’s small enough to hold.

This means that she is small enough to fly from his grasp. And so he stands in the black and white space of the elevator, a mockery of the shades of grey that have become his life, and he watches her go.

He is hers. He will always, always be hers.

 _I am yours_ , he thinks. _But you aren’t mine_.


	3. Helena

Helena is in the warehouse. This is fine. Dark spaces are good to her – they hide her. Shadows are pleasant things to know, and light shines brighter in them. And she is the light.

There is a body lying next to her, gasping dully. The stain on its side is colorless, dark on dark on dark. This is fine too.

Helena is wearing Sarah’s shirt, and this is more than fine. It smells like Sarah, slightly, and when she breathes she can almost feel the pressure of Sarah’s arms again, around her. Her own arms curl around her, slightly, but they aren’t the same. They _are_ the same, and that is miraculous, but Sarah has been through different fires than Helena and they have forged her strong and true. Her silhouette burns like metal in Helena’s mind, as bright as her own—

A bubbling wheeze from the body. This is growing tedious. Helena weaves her way closer to it in a vague sort of way, head cocked to the side, nodding from time to time as if it has anything to say to her. If it did, she wouldn’t want to hear it anyways. This body brought her into the world and abandoned her to it. All of her dark places are its fault, but the light that shines through? She has seen it in Sarah, too, and so it is her own.

“Yes,” she says, to hear the sound of her own voice. Her teeth are a white gleam in the dark. Yes, she is the light. “Did you meet my sister?” The body’s eyes flutter open. It says nothing. Perhaps it didn’t hear her? She continues anyway, looking into the shadows. “Her name is Sarah. She is strong, and brave.” Tilting her head to the side, Helena nods at some invisible comment. “I was in a cage,” (she was in a cage she was in a cage cage cage cage cage) “and she set me free. We are sisters. We have a connection.”

The body stirs at that. “You are nothing alike,” it says, voice bubbling.

Helena stiffens for a second, her muscles tensing in one strangled motion, then leans in swiftly. Her face meets its face and she leans, deliberately, on the spreading stain on its side. Its muffled gasp is drowned out by her voice (as it should be _she is the light_ ). “That is _your fault_ ,” she moans. “You took me away from my sister. We should have been family.” When she closes her eyes, she can see it – her and Sarah and Kira, holding hands. She drew it dark on the warehouse walls, again and again, and she wished she’d had other colors. Bright as the glow behind her eyelids. In her head they are somewhere bright and warm, but she doesn’t know where. She can’t see it, yet. Sarah would know. Sarah knows a lot of things that Helena doesn’t know. Sarah is bright and strong and—

“Helena?”

 _Here_. Sarah is here, she came, she came when Helena was in a cage and she came when she built one. Helena grins, bright and strong. Connection. What does this bloody thing know about light, when it is dark on dark? How can it pretend to know a thing, when its own corruption dribbles from its side, its mouth?

“Helena?”

Oh, Sarah’s voice trembles. She is so afraid! Helena feels a lurch- _thud_ in her chest, and her wings ache. Sarah is afraid, but she moves on anyway. She is so _brave_ , to walk into the dark. She is as bright as her twin. In their chests shine light. Helena pats the body again, absent-mindedly, and moves back into the shadows. Light shines brightest in the dark, she thinks, breathing in slowly through her nose. Yes. And Sarah, she is certain, will shine brightest of all. 


	4. Intermission

She’s so tired. She is so, so tired. Walking is difficult, and gravity bends her to the earth. Her breathing is awfully loud in her ears, choked by sobs that still bubble their way out of her throat. The body wants to live, even if you don’t. Her body fights her in twitches and shakes and she’s forced to overcompensate her movements, fold her jacket slow as molasses to keep her limbs from twitching themselves to pieces. She’s almost done, though. She’s almost there. The tracks are pulling, pulling, pulling and she is almost _done_.

Footsteps. She turns around dreamily, like moving through water, and meets her own eyes.

Oh. Another one.

Her eyes look strange, obscured by eyeliner. There’s fear in them. Oh, she understands that fear. She will greet it as an old friend, soon.

Beneath that fear, though: strength. She can tell that not-her will reach for her hand, soon, pull her away and lead her like a child back to the grey box of her life and she _can’t_. She can’t do it. It’s too late, now.

_Good luck to you,_ she thinks, letting her body pull her forwards. _You’re probably going to need it._

\--

There’s something different about Beth, she thinks. She’s _angry_. Not that Beth hadn’t been angry before, in this office, but that anger was motivated by a deep animal fear. Desperation, she thought, taking clinical notes on her pad. Beth was desperate for something.

Now that anger only conceals more anger, and beneath that: an iron core Beth hadn’t possessed. It’s strange, but certainly welcome. She thinks she could even like this angrier Beth, if this angrier Beth wasn’t putting all that fury into getting herself back on the force.

That isn’t possible, and she says so, but – Beth is getting out a pad of her own. They are mirrors now, and she fears that when she meets the other woman’s eyes she is going to flinch first.

Something has changed, and the scientist in her is itching to know what.

What gave Beth this strength, untouched by the list of pills tripping off her tongue in a reversal of her addiction? (She doesn’t kid herself. She knew she was ripping this woman apart.) What has made her, suddenly, unbreakable?

What she doesn’t know: this is the last time she will see this Beth. She will spend the rest of her life wondering what caused the change, and coming up with no answers.

What she doesn’t know: there are two Beths. Neither of them will remember her.

\--

She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He wants to pin her to a table and dissect her. He wants to stitch her up with a careful hand and place her on his desk. No, no, he wants to pin her like a butterfly and run his hand through her hair, feel her shake and watch her eyes roll. Her hair is soft. He knows this, now, but he has only gotten a _taste_ of her revulsion and he wants it. All of it.

She is a perfect specimen. He loves her as much as he could ever love anything.

What bravado it takes, to come striding into danger for the sake of some fucktoy. Paul is nothing at all, he knows that. He _owns_ Paul. She doesn’t even know what she’s missing and he could show her. He could show her everything, starting with his tail. She’d like it, he thinks. It takes a certain kind of mind to want to kill your own sisters. He can appreciate a mind like that.

It takes a certain kind of strength to stand there, and shake, and lie to his face. There is steel and iron at the core of her and he wants to taste it. He wants to eat her whole. She is such a lovely, fragile thing. If he broke her in half, what sort of screams would she make? Would she stop, and meet his eyes, and spit in them? He needs to know. It’s the sort of desperation that makes his hands shake on a new taxidermy specimen, the itch to see what makes a body tick. They’d spun her from DNA strands and fervent dreams. She is not a creature of this earth. She is a _miracle_.

(He wants her. He wants her he wants her he wants her.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm kind of concerned at how easy it was to write that last chunk. Hm.


	5. Rachel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [strums guitar] eeeeeveryoooone write proooopuuuunk

The email from Sarah is burning a hole in Rachel’s inbox, all blunt capslock. It lacks subtlety completely. To think how completely like Sarah the text is would be trite, Rachel thinks, if not somewhat true. She’s only had a few minutes to talk face-to-face with Leekie’s dark horse, to see her snarling, all caged energy, across the smooth empty surface of her desk. (Like Rachel, her desk is an ornament disguised as something with purpose disguised again as an ornament. Layers within layers.) Yet she can still pick apart all the subtle differences between them, the way she briefly picked at her zits before she was…deterred.

Rachel uses her words like knives. Sarah uses hers like bombs.

Sarah, you see, has no room for delicacy. She wants the heart of the manner. She wants the _truth_. That shows how little understanding she has of truth, doesn’t it? Rachel thinks so. You show your hand a lot more with lies than with truth. _Motherhood is wonderful_ , she’d said, but Sarah had not taken the bait at all.

She shouldn’t be disappointed. But she is, a little.

There is just so much _potential_ in Sarah. So much anger, simmering, tinder to a fire. And fire has so many uses. Fire can burn a kingdom to the ground. Fire can rip the dead things from a forest and leave it growing greener than ever. The trick is how to _use_ it.

And if Rachel thinks very calmly and very coolly about how the fire of Sarah can be used, she will not think about how little this whole thing feels like a game. The way her hands shook a little on the keyboard of her phone when she heard Sarah’s clomping, forceful footsteps. The beautiful spike in her pulse. The flutter of her eyelids, which she’d curled in the mirror this morning with a gesture identical to putting on war paint. The hope had been that seeing Rachel, all smooth sharp edges, would knock Sarah off-balance the way that Leekie’s acquiescing predatory nature did not.

It unfortunately has done rather the opposite.

(Rachel _cares_.)

She stares at her inbox unseeingly, tracking in her mind the clicking motion of the wheels she’d set in motion. She doesn’t want to be here, in this beautiful glass cage suspended over a city she’s been trained to want. She wants to be in whatever rat hole Sarah’s burrowed into, watching her double blaze a trail across the carpet. She wants Sarah to combust, ignite, and burn down whoever’s trying to hurt her. Rachel’s sharp as flint, herself. She’d be flattered if she could set Sarah burning with the friction of the two of them, sparks flying from where Sarah’s jagged edges catch on her own. She wants that, a little. She can’t be responsible for destruction but she would like to stand in the ashes and think, _I was the spark on the fuse_. She wants a lot of things. This isn’t smart. She thought she had forgotten how to want, but…

A truth: she’s holding on to Sarah’s email out of _base sentimentality._ She likes the defiance of it, the stubborn refusal to be on a first-name basis with a “robot bitch.” Names have power, Rachel knows that well enough.

If this is a game, she wants Sarah to win it. It’s impossible for Rachel to win it. Rachel lost her game a long, long time ago. Her fire is out. Now she is just ashes and a deep weariness. Weariness for the lies and the games and the machinations, the clicking of keyboards and the clipped tones of her voice on the phone.

Sometimes you need to burn everything down and start over.

She smiles a little, and clicks _Save_.

**Author's Note:**

> I want a girl with a mind like a diamond  
> I want a girl who knows what's best  
> I want a girl with shoes that cut  
> And eyes that burn like cigarettes  
> \--"Short Skirt/Long Jacket", by Cake


End file.
